Top 100 Lewis Mumford Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 2 of 3

51. “Humor is our way of defending ourselves from life’s absurdities by thinking absurdly about them.”

— Lewis Mumford

52. “Every work of art is an abstraction from time; it denies the reality of change and decay and death.”

— Lewis Mumford

53. “The settlement of America had its origins in the unsettlement of Europe. America came into existence when the European was already so distant from the ancient ideas and ways of his birthplace that the whole span of the Atlantic did not widen the gulf.”

— Lewis Mumford

54. “The vast material displacements the machine has made in our physical environment are perhaps in the long run less important than its spiritual contributions to our culture.”

— Lewis Mumford

55. “Not sense data or atoms or electrons or packets of energy, but purposes, interests, and meanings, constitute the underlying facts of human experience.”

— Lewis Mumford

56. “Safety razors make it hard to grow beards in America: America would be a better place if there were a few bearded, savage, terrible old men.”

— Lewis Mumford

57. “Without fullness of experience, length of days is nothing. When fullness of life has been achieved, shortness of days is nothing. That is perhaps why the young have usually so little fear of death; they live by intensities that the elderly have forgotten.”

— Lewis Mumford

58. “We must give as much weight to the arousal of the emotions and to the expression of moral and aesthetic values as we now give to science, to invention, to practical organization. One without the other is impotent.”

— Lewis Mumford

59. “The chief enemy of peace is the spirit of unreason itself: an inability to conceive alternatives, an unwillingness to reconsider old prejudices, to part with ideological obsessions, to entertain new ideas or to improve new plans.”

— Lewis Mumford

60. “Mechanical instruments, potentially a vehicle of rational human purposes, are scarcely a blessing when they enable the gossip of the village idiot and the deeds of the thug to be broadcast to a million people each day.”

— Lewis Mumford

61. “Do you want to know what I most regret about my youth? That I didn’t dream more boldly and demand of myself more impossible things; for all one does in maturity is to carve in granite or porphyry the soap bubble one blew in youth! Oh to have dreamed harder!”

— Lewis Mumford

62. “He who touches the soil of Manhattan and the pavement of New York, touches, whenever he knows or not, Walt Whitman.”

— Lewis Mumford

63. “War is the supreme drama of a completely mechanized society.”

— Lewis Mumford

64. “In its revolt against congestion and sordor, a space-hungry generation has, I fear, developed eyes that are bigger than its stomach.”

— Lewis Mumford

65. “Unfortunately, once an economy is geared to expansion, the means rapidly turn into an end and “the going becomes the goal.””

— Lewis Mumford

66. “The last step in parental love involves the release of the beloved; the willing cutting of the cord that would otherwise keep the child in a state of emotional dependence.”

— Lewis Mumford

67. “By fashion and built-in obsolescence the economies of machine production, instead of producing leisure and durable wealth, are duly cancelled out by the mandatory consumption on an even larger scale.”

— Lewis Mumford

68. “This metropolitan world, then, is a world where flesh and blood is less real than paper and ink and celluloid.”

— Lewis Mumford

69. “The cities and mansions that people dream of are those in which they finally live.”

— Lewis Mumford

70. “Today, the notion of progress in a single line without goal or limit seems perhaps the most parochial notion of a very parochial century.”

— Lewis Mumford

71. “Life is an art we are required to practice without preparation, a score that we play at sight even before we have mastered our instruments.”

— Lewis Mumford

72. “Primitive man’s life in Hobbes’ famous words, was short, brutish, and nasty; and this very savagery and anxiety became the justification for an absolute order established, like Descartes’ ideal world, by a single providential mind and will: that of the absolute ruler or monarch. Until men were incorporated into Leviathan, that is, the all-powerful state through which the king’s will was carried out, they were dangerous to their fellows and a burden to themselves.”

— Lewis Mumford

73. “That technics has often lagged behind culture, that the efficiency of the assembly line, for example, might be, humanly speaking, a mark of social backwardness, seems never to have occurred to the exponents of unqualified technological progress.”

— Lewis Mumford

74. “Misery, mutilation, destruction, terror, starvation and death characterize the process of war and form a principal part of the product.”

— Lewis Mumford

75. “When vitality runs high, death takes men by surprise. But if they close their eyes to this possibility, what they gain in peace they lose in sensibility and significance.”

— Lewis Mumford

76. “By putting business before every other manifestation of life, our mechanical and financial civilization has forgotten the chief business of life: namely, growth, reproduction, development. It pays infinite attention to the incubator-and it forgets the egg!”

— Lewis Mumford

77. “Henceforward, I shout to the heavens, I shall deliver no more lectures on behalf of good causes: I am the good cause that denies the need for such lectures. Avaunt, importuning world! Back to my cell.”

— Lewis Mumford

78. “I would die happy if I knew that on my tombstone could be written these words, “This man was an absolute fool. None of the disastrous things that he reluctantly predicted ever came to pass!””

— Lewis Mumford

79. “If there are favourable habitats and favorable forms of association for animalsand plants, as ecology demonstrates, why not for men? If each particular natural environment has has its own balance; is there not perhaps an equivalent of this in culture?”

— Lewis Mumford

80. “Life is the only art that we are required to practice without preparation, and without being allowed the preliminary trials, the failures and botches, that are essential for training.”

— Lewis Mumford

81. “One’s worst enormities remain within, and it is only one’s vulgar commonplaces of error and folly that turn into murders and suicides, treasons, infidelities, and betrayals.”

— Lewis Mumford

82. “Chaos, if it does not harden into a pattern of disorder, may be more fruitful than a regularity too easily accepted and a success too easily achieved.”

— Lewis Mumford

83. “War is a specific product of civilization.”

— Lewis Mumford

84. “In war, the army is not merely a pure consumer, but a negative producer...”

— Lewis Mumford

85. “Traditionalists are pessimists about the future and optimists about the past.”

— Lewis Mumford

86. “The wonder is not that so much cacophony appears in our actual individual lives, but that there is any appearance of harmony and progression.”

— Lewis Mumford

87. “Whereas Freud was for the most part concerned with the morbid effects of unconscious repression, Jung was more interested in the manifestations of unconscious expression, first in the dream and eventually in all the more orderly products of religion and art and morals.”

— Lewis Mumford

88. “Deliberately, on every historic occasion, we piously fake events for the benefit of photographers, while the actual event often occurs in a different fashion; and we have the effrontery to call these artful dress rehearsals authentic historic documents.”

— Lewis Mumford

89. “Not how long you live, but how much you have lived, how much meaning your life has absorbed and passed on, is what matters.”

— Lewis Mumford

90. “As for the various kinds of montage photography, they are in reality not photography at all but a kind of painting in which photography is used – as pastiches of textiles are used in crazy-quilts – to form a mosaic. Whatever value the montage may have derives from painting rather than the camera.”

— Lewis Mumford

91. “Creativity begins in the unconscious; and its first human manifestation is the dream.”

— Lewis Mumford

92. “Each person is a temporary focus of forces, vitalities, and values that carry back to an immemorial past and that reach forward into an unthinkable future.”

— Lewis Mumford

93. “For most Americans, progress means accepting what is new because it is new, and discarding what is old because it is old.”

— Lewis Mumford

94. “We have created an industrial order geared to automatism, where feeble-mindedness, native or acquired, is necessary for docile productivity in the factory; and where a pervasive neurosis is the final gift of the meaningless life that issues forth at the other end.”

— Lewis Mumford

95. “The self holds both a hell and a heaven.”

— Lewis Mumford

96. “Every new baby is a blind desperate vote for survival: people who find themselves unable to register an effective political protest against extermination do so by a biological act.”

— Lewis Mumford

97. “Stieglitz conceived, though he never carried out, a series of photographs of the heads of stallions and mares, of bulls and cows, in the act of mating, hoping to catch in the brute an essential quality that would symbolize the probably unattainable photograph of a passionate human mating.”

— Lewis Mumford

98. “The final goal of human effort is man’s self-transforma tion.”

— Lewis Mumford

99. “Without leisure there can be neither art nor science nor fine conversation, nor any ceremonious performance of the offices of love and friendship.”

— Lewis Mumford

100. “War vies with magic in its efforts to get something for nothing...”

— Lewis Mumford